From my student days, I particularly remember a project-style course on environmental aesthetics where we students were given the challenge of the Lahti bypass, which was then in the planning phase, and its examination from the perspective of aesthetics. We were all invited to Hyvinkää to the large country home of our teacher’s mother. We cooked together, walked in the woods, and discussed and pondered things. A practical case of environmental aesthetics illuminated all those theories that we had tirelessly learned and written about.

The academic discipline of aesthetics now appeared in a new light – as an important fundamental science of multidisciplinary encounters and the phenomenology of perception, with important significance in the practical world. Meeting other students taught me much social agility, genuine interaction, the communications of convincing and influencing, argumentation, commitment, even the marketing and selling of one’s own ideas.

I became more courageous and enthusiastic, and my self-confidence grew. I realised that I could cope in non-routine situations when confronting the new. I realised that creativity and innovativeness are good things where a real problem is concerned and that proactivity is still worthwhile: together we also had to achieve visible results.

Together with Pauline von Bonsdorff, we wrote the book Ympäristöestetiikan polkuja (‘Paths in environmental aesthetics’), which is by nature a work of art but at the same time a work of scholarly philosophy.